The Name They Gave Us First

For the believer who has run out of safe answers to a simple question about what they are.

It is twenty past twelve on a Tuesday, and the tea has gone cold in his hand without him noticing.

The apprentice at the other end of the scaffold board asks it the way people ask about the weather. "You go to church, don't you. What are you, then?"

He has believed for twenty six years, and he cannot answer a question a child could answer. He runs the options fast, the way you do, and every one of them has something folded inside that will come out later. One word, and the lad thinks of his gran and a cold building. Another, and he thinks of the man who used to shout on the high street.

So he says, "Ah, you know," and pulls a face. The apprentice laughs and lets it go. He thinks about it for eleven days afterward.

You have had that lunch. Maybe yours was a box on a form, or your daughter's boyfriend being polite at a table. The tiredness you feel is not about believing at all. You are tired of the argument that comes free with every available way of saying so.

The oldest word you have for yourself was a description long before it was ever a side. The written Word puts that name in a market town in Syria before any later name existed, and the Holy Spirit keeps it current in your mouth today rather than filing it away as history.

What Eleven Days of Thinking Costs You

Here is the part nobody says out loud. The cost is not embarrassment, it is that you begin to edit yourself.

You get good at the sideways answer. You learn which word to use with which person, and you learn to watch a face for the half second it takes somebody to sort you. You start leading with what you are not, because that is quicker than explaining what you are.

Eventually you notice you have gone a whole week loving God and never once said so in a room where it could be heard. That is not a character flaw. It is what happens to anyone made to carry a public argument every time they name a private love.

The apprentice asked a five word question. You answered a hundred years of somebody else's history.

A Word That Nobody Voted On

There is a city in the account called Antioch, a long way north of Jerusalem, a trading town crowded with people who were not from there.

Something started in it. Believers scattered by trouble arrived and began talking about Jesus to Greeks, which was not the plan and had not been agreed anywhere. A great many of them trusted Him. Barnabas came up to look at it, and the text says that when he saw it he was glad. He went to find Saul, brought him back, and the two of them spent a full year teaching a very large number of people.

The closing line of the verse is this:

And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.Acts 11:26 (KJV)

Sit with how ordinary that is. Nobody voted. There is no council, no founding document, no meeting where believers gathered to settle what they ought to be known as.

The name arrived from outside, from the neighbors, from the people watching. You can almost hear it said across a market stall: those ones, the Christ ones. His name with an ending stuck on the back of it, the way a town names a family after the trade they do.

You are named by whose you are before you are ever named by which side you are on. Scripture hands that name to ordinary disciples at Antioch, and the Holy Spirit makes it a present belonging rather than a fact about the first century.

The Name Came From People Outside the Room

This is the part that took me a long time to see, and I think it is the whole hinge of it.

The first name believers ever carried was not chosen by believers. It was given by neighbors who were watching how they lived. The oldest word for your faith is therefore not a claim you are making about yourself, it is a description somebody else made because the resemblance was visible.

That changes what the apprentice was asking. He was not asking you to defend a position. He was asking what you resemble.

Notice, too, what the name does not do. It settles none of the questions believers have been made to fight about, and it says nothing about water, nothing about bread, nothing about who stands at the front. It is the word that already existed before anyone thought to ask them, and it did not stop being true once they were asked.

You are free to answer out of resemblance instead of out of argument. The written Word gives that name to people who were simply recognized, and the Holy Spirit is the one making the resemblance in you, so the answer is His work before it is your defense.

What I Am Not Putting On You

I want to be plain, because there is a version of this message that would hurt you, and I will not write it.

I am not asking you to drop the name your own church gave you. The name in the place where the gospel first reached you is not a corruption of anything, and there is a fire in it. Somebody in your tradition sat up late loving Christ, and it cost them, and that is part of the reason His name is known at all.

This is not a replacement. It is a floor under the floor. I am not offering you another group to join either, because if this became one more word for sorting people it would have turned into the very thing it describes the absence of.

You already hold the older word, and holding it takes nothing away from the one you were given. Scripture stacks the Antioch name underneath every later name without canceling a single one of them, and the Holy Spirit keeps it load bearing instead of competitive.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Nova This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.